I didn't want Saturday's 2008 English Speaking Union Shakespeare Competition to go without some note.
I am a member of the ESU precisely because of the competition, which I enjoy and think important.
Each year the group sponsors the competition, where young actors from area high schools present dramatic monologues and sonnet interpretations from Shakespeare.
This year 18 high schoolers showed up for the competition. That's the most I've ever seen there.
The best actor wins $300 and a trip to New York City for the national competition. Second prize is $200 and third is $100. One time a local kid won the national competition and got to go to London to study Shakespeare for three weeks.
The top four or five competitors were tightly group on my scoresheet. They all had real fire in their acting, maintained stage presence and, most importantly, showed that they thoroughly understood the material they were presenting.
That isn't always simple with Shakespeare.
I'm glad I wasn't a judge because it would be hard to chose among them.
I can't argue with the judge's winner: Olivia Shadid from Cascia Hall. She did an effective and acrobatic interpretation of Puck from ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' and performed Sonnet No. 17.
Second place was Jake Kelsey of Broken Arrow, who had an impressive reading of Edmund from ''King Lear.'' Third place was Zack Tunnell of Jenks, who was a genuinely funny Launcelot Gobbo, the clown from ''The Merchant of Venice.''
The competition is an effective way of getting teenagers thinking about and working through Shakespeare.
As Dr. Harland Hoffman, the former chairman of the University of Nebraska English Department and one of Saturday's judges, put it in his comments at the end of the competition: ''Shakespeare lives, doesn't he.''
